2004

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Sunday, December 26th, 2004

sdfgh;

It seems there is no recluse for me. I don’t think I’ll say any more about that.

I hope you all had Happy Christmas’s. We leave this afternoon for the Leeds Airport, where we’ll stay the night before catching the 7am flight to Geneva. Dunno how internet access will be there. Had a white christmas here, very pretty. Got an iPod for xmas, but it’s broken, so that’s that.

Eight is a lot of legs, David…

Okok, I know, I know! I haven’t posted in ages. I’ve been busy with finals, and moving back, and then.. relaxing : )! Relaxing takes up a lot of time, you know!

Mostly I’ve been busy buying presents, wrapping presents, gathering presents to be taken to Britain (that cant be wrapped due to they might be BOMBS!), gathering wrapping materials to pack to take to Britain to wrap my presents with (my Dad always seems to just have strips of paper left, I don’t know how he ever gets anything wrapped), and gathering things on the lists my Dad keeps emailing over of things I need to bring over with me (aluminium foil, rice krispies). But it’s been good fun, I enjoy going to the mall when it’s all Christmassy. Yesterday I sat and watched the little kids get put on Santa’s knee at Northeast Mall and it was really great. Little kids, that I love watching because they remind me of the siblings I don’t get to see often, and Santa, whom I have fond memories of, sitting on his knee and telling him I wanted Puppy Surprise, or one of those electronic Barbie Cars you could sit in (even though I really wanted the GI Joe, or whatever the ‘guy’ car was.. I was too shy to ask).

Speaking of old toys, before I left SU Shalane and I sat down and went through a website with 80′s toys and found all the ones we used to have, and remembered having, and wanted. It was great fun!

Anyway, so I’ve decided to put you all in the Xmas mood by putting up my top 10 Christmas songs for my friends.. so here you go!

(Please download and listen, don’t stream!)

10. The Christmas Song – Nat ‘King’ Cole – A classic, I know, but such a great one! There’s something about it that draws me in every time, and I sing it constantly. I like this version because Nat ‘King’ Cole’s voice is the best for the song.

9. Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt – Kylie remade this one recently, but personally I like this version better, because Eartha Kitt’s voice sounds more innocent and cute in some way. This is just a fun song, and amusing.

8. Happy Christmas (War is Over) – John & Yoko – A Christmas Classic, a good song, and a truer one these past few Christmasses with the War in Iraq. Wish it could be over just cuz I wanted it, like the lyrics say… *sigh*

7. Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Band Aid – This single was released to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia, no profit was made from it, and all the famous artists of the time got together to perform. Due to it being a completely non-profit song, it redefined the music industry in Britain, as many of the copyright/producing companies wanted a cut of the money. The bands threatened to create their own music industry in order to produce the song completley non-profit. From this site that lists all the artists in Band Aid: “It was released November of 1984, and immediately debuted at Number One in Great Britain, and was Number One on the American charts two weeks later.. The song was written by Sir Bob Geldof, and sold fifty million copies. It sold over 3 million copies in Great Briton alone. Midge Ure was the co-producer, and he personally accompaned the first relief shipment of over $70,000 worth of food and medical supplies to Ethiopa, March 11, 1985.” ‘Band Aid 20′ (compilation of today’s great artists) recorded a new version of the single in 2004 and released it Nov 29 to raise money for people in Sudan. It’s projected to be 2004′s Christmas Number One in Britain. (Xmas number one in Britain is a big deal.) The lyrics are also very true.

6. Merry Xmas Everybody – Slade – Redone by many people, this is the original, and the best! Most other people replace the play on words in one of the lines ‘..if you land upon your head then you’ve been slay-ed/sleighed/slade’ with ‘..if you land upon your head then you’ll say’ which is boring and un-funny. This song is often sung at [British] football matches around Christmas, and hearing thousands of people roar it is just amazing!

5. Christmas Wrapping – The Waitresses – Recently remade by the Spice Girls, the original is definitely the best. A catchy song that’s down to earth but great fun to listen to and sing along to once you know the words.

4. Stop the Cavalry – Jona Lewie – The simplicity of Jona Lewie’s voice in this song as he talks about war and dying and nuclear fallout zones just makes the whole song. It’s a really catchy song.

3. I Believe in Father Christmas – Greg Lake – I love the lyrics in this song, especially the opening verse. It to me brings to mind a lot of memories. It might seem a bit confusing at first, bit if you listen you catch the message in the song. For those of you up on music, you’ll recognise Lt. Keyjay’s theme played in between verses.

2. A Winter’s Tale – The Magnets – Such a bittersweet Christmas song, I’m sure most of us have felt this in some form, at some time, in relation to someone. The intro includes the quote I end this post with… please listen, it’s the way he says it that makes it so good! I’m pretty sure this is all acappella.

1. Driving Home for Christmas – Chris Rea – A 1988 UK Single, my favorite Christmas song of them all! I played this song as I exited I-30 for Cooper driving home from SU this year, and I’ll be playing as I drive from Newcastle Airport to the Cottage!

And so I leave tomorrow. Yes, sudden I know. And I’m here typing up all of this instead of packing. The big kick is that nobody in Britain knows I’m coming except my dad and my grandmother, so the twins and Kenneth are not expecting me to show up! So I’ll just magically appear on the doorstep on the Christmas Eve Eve (23rd). I’m looking forwards to it so much… from ‘Driving Home for Christmas’: Oh I can’t wait to see those faces…

My Itinerary:

22nd Dec – Leave USofA on jet plane (Boeing 777 to be specific)

23rd Dec – Arrive LGW about 7:20am and spend day looking around Christmassy London

I might be online more this time, because apparently my Dad has a wireless network now, but you can always text me (same number) and I’ll get it. Not sure if it’ll work in Switzerland, we’ll see.

So, my friends, I hope you have an extremely happy Christmas… And a glorious New Year. I hope you get everything you asked for, and more, and that you have a great time with friends and family, enjoying the wonderful season that is so much warmth and happiness.

To Make Fickity Fick

Yea, I know I haven’t posted much… Finals for me are this next week and I’m gonna get my ass kicked if I don’t buckle down, so don’t expect much this week. I didn’t have much last week because I had a chem test Friday and a biology presentation Friday (the species I picked to present on was Ixodes holocyclus or the Paralysis Tick- it is cool!). Anyway, so I have three final exams (bio, chem, calc) and one final paper (Islam). I’m off to read for Islam now, since the final is over a reading I never did (which is most of them). I leave you with this little tidbit I found on in the archives of my sister’s site from a while ago. Enjoy!

While waiting for my stepdad to pick me up from the baseball game, I for some odd reason, started to think about Chevy’s. In the commercials, their motto is “Chevy – like a rock.” The weird thing being – who the hell wants their car to be like a rock?

Excited about Christmas….!

Christmas is awesome, and so I decided to show it. Here are pictures of my dorm’s decorated door and window! I ran an extension cord to the door so we could get lights around it, and we are cool. The window does normally look quite well lit because the purple tube lights are always up, and the big white lights are actually skulls and actually from halloween.. but we liked them so much we didnt want to take them down. The multicolored lights are what I put up for Christmas. Around the door, we usually dont have lights, obviously, or tinsel, or the big bows. The first picture of the window is the most recent, as the clocks show, it is after I put the snowflake stickers on the glass. The second picture (with me in it) was taken earlier.

About the pumpkins with hats on…. I originally got them for Halloween to carve.. But never got around to it. If you don’t cut or open a pumpkin, they stay good for a very long time, so these two are still perfectly lovely. I feel horrible throwing them away, since I never forfilled my promise to them to carve them. They need a home! But they just didn’t match the Christmas theme… So I bought them hats so they can be Christmassy too. Shalane thought up the idea to decorate our own stockings, so we bought some cheap stockings and paint pens and sat up at 2am last night painting our stockings, which wasnt easy at all! But it all looks awesome!

I am a happy little girl, as the picture of me with my creation shows. Here are the pictures!:

Check Back Tomorrow

cuz i’ll post pictures of all the xmas stuff i did today! my dorm room is totally xmas-ed out, w00t! it’s amusing, beacause as far as xmas decorating goes, me and shalane (our door), and amanda (her door), are the only people who’ve really done much, and we’ve definitely done the most. we’re also the most unreligious people on the floor. Ha! we beat the christians at their own game.

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.

You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You’ll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!

Geek [to You]: I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!

My Sinuses are Gone

…ammonia ate them away. We had a chemistry lab and it involved lots of lovely ammonia, which I ended up inhaling large quantities of. I felt like it was eating away the insides of my head, slowly, sinuses out. So now my skull is just empty, with nothing inside, not even a brain. It’ll regrow soon, I suspect. In the meantime, I doubt I will miss it. I don’t use the thing enough anyway.

So apparently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking today, despite my ammonia-snorting and empty-skull, because I’ve got two things on my mind, or what is left of it.

Firstly, concerning people’s justification on restricting media coverage of wars, and the dead people coming back from wars, and the civilians we kill accident’s-on-purpose during our wars. I don’t think that there should be any restrictions on media coverage of the gruesome side of war, I think we should have to face up to what we’ve done, and what the costs are for what we’ve done. People always argue back to me that this would decrease support for the war. Apparently this is most important, though I never really understood the logic. Often it is told to me that this is why so many people didn’t support the Vietnam war, because it was the first war really covered by the media, especially in such an instantaneous way (news being able to get back to America much more quickly than before). So, let’s think about it. People used to think wars were ok before they could see pictures and really visualize what was going on. So now we have the opportunity to see pictures, and really comprehend what we’re doing, but we shouldn’t be able to access these pictures because we might then decide war is not so very ok, after all. Especially if the reasons for getting into the war are iffy. It seems like we should have the freedom to change our opinion of anything if we gain more information on it… not that information should be withheld just so we don’t change our minds. It’s just the way history works… we find out more information about something, and we change our minds. We (as a race) used to draw and quarter people publicly. Do we now keep doing it, but simply hiding the evidence of how painful it is, and stopping the media from covering it? No, we stopped doing the action. Because as people learned more, as times changed, it became undesirable, uncivilized, inhumane. We learned, we changed our opinion. Why not the same for war? Why must we assume the default that war is always ok, and above all else the notion that it is always ok must be preserved?

In my opinion, if there is a true reason for going into a war, it will defend itself, no matter how many gory pictures are displayed.

My second thought is not nearly so noble. It’s much more sappy, and pertaining to love. I feel like love between two people is like a scientific theory: the more testing it withstands, the more it is worth. You can’t simply refuse to test it, or refuse to put it in any situation where it might be tested, for the fear that it will fail as a theory, for that is ignorant love, and an untested theory, which is worth very little. And if it does fail, while being tested, it doesn’t mean it has to be a completely disregarded, out of date theory – it can be revised so it stands up to even more testing. Then, it’s a stronger, better theory than you started out in the first place.

And that is what is rattling in my head at the moment, two small dried peas in a giant empty shell otherwise filled with fog and ghosts, foxfire, will o’ the wisp, and delusions.

Everything Sucks

Ever have one of those days, when, by the end of it, you just pretty much hate humanity in general? I had one today. Actually my faith in just.. people in general, as dropped to a new, all-time low.

Today, my battery went flat in my car. I took Latifa, two RA’s, a cop, and a mechanic/car-fixer-type-person and his truck, to get it going again, and it took a good hour. It was amazingly flat. I dont know how it got flat. Better not be broken, damnit. Anyway, once I was on my way, I was late. But I’d missed dinner trying to jump-start my car. I’d not had much lunch cuz it sucked really badly. So I went through Wendy’s drive through, and of course the line was huge. I ate while driving to Austin on the highway.. jr bacon cheeseburger, medium fries, crispy chicken nuggets. I reeked of fast food, I’m sure. The traffic was, of course, horrible, and I had trouble finding parking before finally going to the garage. I met some interesting people. But overall, as I was driving home, I just.. realised that people suck. People inflict so much pain over other people.. and they are so confusing. The never just do things straight out, it’s always some kind of puzzle. People have so much control over other people, too. If I could just read people’s minds it’d be better. Even if you think you know an event that relates to why I’m saying this, you’re probably wrong, because this is just something that’s been building up for a while now. In short, I’ve lost my trust in people. Individuals. People on my buddy list. Maybe I’m doubting friendship, or loyalty. I don’t know.

I feel like a nasty person right now. Evil, really evil. I fail to see what good I’ve ever done, or will ever do. It seems like my life is just full of hurting various people at various degrees. I don’t ever seem to help people, or maybe it’s just not made as vocal, I don’t know. Anyway, I dislike myself strongly. I know no one reading this really cares, though, and I don’t really expect you to. I wouldn’t care if I read this, I’d think I was a depressed, self-obsessive idiot.

Mork A Spas

I really dont have much to say at all… Thanksgiving soon, Christmas soon too. I got new red ski pants.. well not really new ones, since I never had ‘old’ ones. But they are new, as in, not used before.

The title comes from a bookmark I made a long time ago that my mom found while going through some stuff. It was a white piece of paper cut into a heart, written on it: “mork a spas”. Roughly translated that means.. ‘mark a space’. I used to be so cute. What happened?

I am Emma. I am a dual-citizen: half British and half American - but I was born in Norway. I love potatoes and purple. I'm shy, but not. I work on computers, bikes, and DNA, and I play violin. Here is the story of a transplant from Texas to Scotland...